As Israel bands together over their kidnapped boys, the world’s silence is deafening

GIVAT SHMUEL, Israel June 15, 2014 — As the brilliant Simon Wiesenthal famously said, “for evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”

In the case of the three young Israeli boys who were kidnapped late Thursday night by Islamic terrorists while heading home from school, far too many people have done worse than nothing.

Perhaps nothing would have been better than incessantly calling these young innocent kids, two of them just 16 years old and the other only 19, “settlers” at every opportunity, somehow implying these high school kids had it coming.

Perhaps nothing would have been better than the idiotic piece in the Jewish Daily Forward criticizing Jews everywhere for using the #bringourboysback because, “It’s wrong to capitalize on the virality of one nation’s desperate and grief-soaked social media plea in order to increase the virality of your own campaign.”

Perhaps nothing would have been better than UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon’s urging for Israeli restraint while Islamic animals run around the country doing G-d knows what to three faultless children.

Or perhaps not.

The nothing that has been US President Barack Obama’s response to the kidnapping is pretty awful in its own right. This petty tyrant in the White House has rushed headlong into nearly every miniscule political gripe in his presidency, yet three young innocent Israelis don’t warrent his time. Heck, Jews are not even worthy of the milquetoast hashtag diplomacy of the First Lady. Perhaps if the young kids were kidnapped by complex carbohydrates she would have made a statement already.

John Kerry’s know-nothing statement, in addition to his irreparably tarnished track-record vis-à-vis the Jewish State, does little to assure anyone in Israel or abroad.

The muted outcry against Fatah’s Facebook post of a cartoon depicting the kidnapped boys as three dead rats, in their best Nazi impression, is also deeply unsettling.

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The condemnation that never came following the dancing and candy allocation in the streets of Gaza following the news that these children had been taken, a stark replay of the Gaza parties post-September 11, is equally appalling.

Is it possible that the gut-wrenching pain every Israeli has had lodged in their stomachs as they went about their Sunday is so controversial that it isn’t worth acknowledging?!

Is it possible that the tears that have rained down from the eyes of every Israeli parent and child in the past few days are so grossly misguided as to be reproached, re-appropriated, equated or discredited?

Has the world we live in become so blinded by ideological and political divisiveness that it is too much to expect that no matter what side of any political spectrum you fall out on, the grabbing of three kids under the age of 20 who were on their way home to their families for the weekend can be anything but horrific, tragic and unconscionable?!

Where are you justice of the world?

Where are you lovers of life, liberty and freedom?

Do you know something, world, about Gilad, Eyal and Naftali that we don’t, which deems them unworthy of the world’s uproar at their horrendous abduction?

Have the international community’s mirrors fogged so completely that looking at ourselves in the eye has become a practice as extinct as the dinosaurs?!

For their part, most Jews are doing something. As the world abandons the Jewish People for the umpteenth time, the people of the State of Israel and many of the other Jewish communities around the world are turning to the only thing that will always be there for them; the grace of G-d. The Chosen People have risen up, organizing mass prayer gatherings with lightning speed. The Jewish People have seen this story before, and know how contagious silence can be in the face of atrocity.

(Image 2: Mass prayer for the safe return of the three kidnapped boys in Givat Shmuel Sunday (Source: Doni Kandel) Image 3: Fathers hold on a little tighter to their children at a mass prayer for the safe return of the three kidnapped boys in Givat Shmuel Sunday. (Source: Doni Kandel))

If you truly consider yourself a person of morality and compassion then you should be doing everything in your power to bring these boys back home safely from the hands of the despicable miscreants known as Islamic Jihadists.

May G-d empower the Israeli government, the Israeli soldiers and any other person, place or thing that may be required to return these sweet young boys home to their family, their friends and their nation as safe and as soon as possible.

Doni Kandel has been writing about Israeli and Jewish issues since the age of 13. Originally from Los Angeles, he now lives in central Israel, teaching high school history. He holds an M.A. in Counter-Terrorism and Homeland Security from the IDC Herzliya.